I'm at an intelligence community conference this week, and at one of the open sessions (press allowed in) this morning, the speaker talked about how the IC needs to work on networking better. He gave an example of how the FBI had asked some hotel chains for info, and the hotels said, "We'll have to talk to our legal department," and balked. But some of the local LEOs had made connections with hotel security staff who passed on the info--collected on their own, not through accessing corporate files, mind you--under the table. This was cited as a "success story" in connecting the dots and networking.

On the whole, the IC (at least the parts I deal with) is very aware of privacy issues and goes out of their way to avoid problems, but hearing someone promote something like that made me cough a couple of times.

I guess this one was a grey area of sorts; the hotel security guys had collected info on suspicious behavior and passed it on to friends, yet if they hadn't been in their positions they never would have been able to collect that info, either.

But having read the NY Times article on the feds wanting extra travel info on each and every airline reservation really made me think on this one.